by Linda Jaivin
‘Yes, I’m used to it by now,’ I answered. Then, deadpan: ‘And you?’
‘I was born here,’ Mrs Jin shrugged. Her family, a distant branch (more like a twig) of the Qing dynasty’s imperial clan, had originated in the even colder climes of the northeast. They’d been Manchu Bannermen, part of the military, political and social nobility that the Qing court had allowed to drift into creative languor on generous pensions until the dynasty collapsed in 1911. By the time Mrs Jin’s father was born, in 1926, the family fortunes had fallen, and not nearly so graciously as in that early, great novel of Bannerman decay, The Dream of the Red Chamber. Her grandfather, who’d changed his Manchu surname to Jin in 1911 to avoid being beaten up or worse by the revolutionary anti-Qing mobs raging around the city, pulled a rickshaw. Her grandmother rolled the family’s heirlooms, one by one, inside rags of rough cotton. There were precious jades and scrolls, ornate cricket cages and even the embroidered badges from their ancestors’ court robes. She carried them to the antique dealers south of the city’s Qianmen gate. The merchants were wily, but apparently, and not surprisingly, no match for Mrs Jin’s grandmother, even in her desperate state. For a while, her grandfather did reasonably well – for a rickshaw puller, anyway – finding steady employment with a generous Swiss physician who lived in the Legation Quarter. The Jins rented or sold off most of what had been a grand mansion of interlocking courtyards, clinging on to one small rectangle into which they piled all the relatives of their extended and increasingly disordered family.
When he was twenty and civil war broke out, Mrs Jin’s father joined the People’s Liberation Army and the Communist Party and eventually rose to a respectable rank in the military. In turn, at the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Mrs Jin, who was sixteen, joined the Red Guards and helped to ransack her own home, which was then sealed off: effectively confiscated. Eventually she came into re-possession of it via spider-webbed post-Mao mercantile machinations that she had once explained to me in such intricate detail that I was unable to retain a single thread of it. Mrs Jin was a retired functionary of the Bureau of Statistics, widowed and merrily so. I took it that the late Mr Jin – who’d taken her surname for (again that word) complicated reasons – had been something of a bore.
‘I saw your soldier friends were here again last night,’ I remarked as Mimi crept into sight and, seeing her chance, bounded up onto the ta to settle proprietorially into my lap, hooking her claws into my jumper and indolently pulling up threads.
Mrs Jin giggled like a schoolgirl. ‘Hope we weren’t too loud.’ Her friends, many of them old Red Guards like herself, had, as usual, shouted themselves hoarse playing drinking games and bellowing old revolutionary songs into the microphone of her bass-challenged karaoke machine. I could hear the pealing of their laughter at what were no doubt wildly off-colour jokes and political impersonations. The noise had swept through the courtyard in great waves, rattling my windows like the wind.
‘I didn’t hear a thing,’ I said. ‘Did you have fun?’
‘You should come and join us next time.’
The last time I’d joined Mrs Jin’s friends, not long after moving into the courtyard, they’d spent the first half of the evening marvelling at my ability to speak Chinese and the second half drinking me under the table. I had a vague memory of crawling back to my wing on my hands and knees – luckily it was summer. I woke up with the imprint of a toilet seat on my cheek and a head full of lion-dance drums. Most alarming of all, colour had temporarily leached from my vision: the world was tinted sepia, like an old photograph. It took several panicked hours before colour returned. I had no intention of ever repeating the experience. ‘I look forward to it,’ I said, extracting Mimi’s claws from my jumper and pushing aside the short-legged wooden writing table, the kangzhuo, that I had bought at the same time as the ta. I stretched my legs, which were prickling all over with pins and needles. Mimi climbed on top of them and worked her claws into my woollen leggings.
Mrs Jin leaned over and fingered the little desk as though seeing it for the first time. ‘What did that seller at Panjiayuan tell you this was made of again?’
‘Pear wood.’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve been reading Ma Weidu’s books.’ Ma Weidu was a celebrity antiques expert who wrote books, presented a TV show and had opened a private museum.
‘And?’
She narrowed her eyes and ran her fingers over the wood again. ‘I doubt it.’
The man who sold me the kangzhuo, a friendly old gent with a beard that grew out of a single large mole on his chin, swore that the desk was over a hundred years old and had once been the property of a top scholar in the imperial examinations. Mrs Jin shook her head at that. I hadn’t entirely believed him either. On the other hand, it wasn’t inconceivable that at some point in its humble existence, a Chinese scholar might have arrayed atop it the Four Treasures of the Study – brushes, ink, inkstone and rice paper – just as I ranged my own: laptop, notebook, gel pen and mobile phone. Six treasures if you counted the coffee plunger and mug. I did.
‘What are you writing?’
‘Nothing really,’ I said, closing the notebook, not that Mrs Jin would have been able to read it anyway. The words My Notbook were engraved on the cover, making it an irresistible buy. I shoved it back into place in the muster of locally produced notebooks on the bookshelf awaiting the long march to the Great Twenty-First-Century Bestseller. The inside cover of each one bore a different title, an epigraph and the start of a novel. These ranged from the comic political thriller Desktop, about a disorganised commander-in-chief who loses the nuclear launch codes, to the saucy psycho-sexual romance Get Out of My Head or I’m Coming In After You. ‘Stupid stuff.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Mrs Jin said. ‘You’re smart, Linnie.’ I had a Chinese name but most people just called me by my English name, Linnie, because it was easy to pronounce in Chinese. They wrote it as (lin) (ni), two characters that were common to many girls’ names in China. ‘You wouldn’t write stupid stuff.’
Little did she know. ‘You’re too kind.’
‘You’re too modest.’
I shrugged. ‘You zizhi zhi ming.’ I’m illuminated by the knowledge of my own limitations.
‘Waa.’
On the title page of the ‘notbook’ I’d written the words A Massive Thing. The phrase came from a quotation by a famous Taiwan writer called Li Ao: ‘China’s a massive thing, still hidden in the mists. The Chinese don’t understand China; all they know are “Chinese clichés”. Foreigners don’t understand China; all they know is “Chinese chop suey”.’ I wasn’t sure yet if I was writing a novel, history, memoir, or perhaps just some mutant genre, an erotic-zombie-prose poem, for example, or perhaps just an autobiographical mystery. All I knew was that it was a massive thing in all senses of the word, and that I’d been trying to write one version or another of it for nearly twenty-five years, which felt like a lifetime, even if my lifetime had already included two sets of twenty-five years and then some. Shit, I was old. How did that happen? But as for A Massive Thing: this one, at least, was not intended as an airport novel. It might not even have wings. But I had come to the point where I felt I could no longer take off without it; even if I’d made several stabs at it back in Australia, it was a story that, I had realised, could never reach its conclusion unless I returned here to China where it began.
Just before Mrs Jin walked in, I’d been inscribing an epigraph into the notebook. It came from Graham Greene (to use the Li Ao quotation would have been too easy – I had truly developed a penchant for the fuza): ‘Leaving the miraculous out of life is rather like leaving out the lavatory or dreams or breakfast.’ I rarely overlooked breakfast. I often dreamed even when awake. And living in China, I was uncommonly attentive to the subject of lavatories. As for the miraculous, up until that moment, it had been a long time since it had made its presence felt in my life. I was ready.
That’s when I noticed the envelope that Mrs Jin was
clutching in her nuggety little hand. Funny how coincidences in real life work like that. You could never get away with it in a novel.
My phone rang before I had a chance to ask about the letter. ‘Mind if I get that?’
‘Go right ahead.’ Mrs Jin plucked Mimi off my legs and tickled her ears. Mimi closed her eyes and pushed her head into Mrs Jin’s hand, crinkling the envelope.
‘Wei? Oh, Duan Mou, ni hao?’ I gestured for Mrs Jin to take a seat on the ta. Mrs Jin made a face, indicated it wasn’t so great for her back, and remained cheerfully upstanding. I glanced meaningfully at the envelope to say that if it was a letter for me she could just leave it. But if Mrs Jin got the hint, she didn’t take it.
‘Long time no hear … Really? Tarantino wants to see it? Really? Quentin Tarantino? Huh … wow.’ I suppose stranger things had happened in the history of world cinema. ‘I haven’t been online. I’ll check now. Hold on.’
I opened my laptop, checked my emails and picked up the phone again. ‘Yup. Got it. Word file and QQ link. Let me just … Okay. Downloading now. I’ll let you know if there’s any problem. When’s the deadline, by the way? … Tonight? You are kidding … You’re serious. Uh, hold on a minute, let me see if I can fit it into my schedule …’ I mentally reviewed my financial situation, which was strained, and my current commitments, which were minimal. A Massive Thing would have to wait. ‘No problem. You too. Talk later.’ I hung up, shaking my head. I’d been subtitling Chinese films for years. I was used to film directors and producers coming to me at the last minute with urgent translation jobs they surely had known about weeks, if not months, in advance, but this took the cake, or at least, being Beijing, the shallot pancake.
The thing is, Duan Mou was normally good, even considerate, about this sort of thing. He was a low-key and agreeable chap known for directing a stream of commercially successful, critically unacclaimed rom-coms, all of which I had translated. But this, he had informed me just now with an air of immense self-importance, was an art film. What’s more, a representative of Quentin Tarantino who was visiting China needed to see it – the following day.
Don’t get me wrong. I like art films. I’m fond of Bergman and Tarkovsky and Renoir, and the new wave from Iran and many of the American independents. But I’m also a practised enough translator to understand that the phrase art film in any language meant poorly paid in any other. Duan Mou was a mate. I just hoped that he wasn’t being conned by someone pretending to represent Tarantino; China was, after all, as Mrs Jin would say, rather complicated that way. But a job was a job. As the Quicktime file continued to spool onto my hard drive, I returned my attention to Mrs Jin and the envelope. ‘Is that …’
‘You know,’ Mrs Jin said, ‘I didn’t think that Love Under Guang’anmen Overpass was such a great film. The novel was better.’
I hadn’t read the novel on which Duan Mou had based his last film. ‘Absolutely,’ I agreed. ‘Much.’ With what I calculated to be a purposeful, must-get-onto-it and yet not impolite tone, I directed my gaze to the envelope and continued: ‘So …’
‘It’s a bit chilly in here, isn’t it?’ Mrs Jin glanced around her with a faux-casual air, her eyes lighting on the electric radiator that supplemented my room’s feeble central heating. ‘You know that you can only use one –’
‘– stand-alone heater at a time or I’ll blow all the fuses.’
Mrs Jin beamed like a teacher whose student had just recited the multiplication tables forwards and backwards. She gave the impression of having all the time in the world. Which she did.
I was always the first to blink. ‘Is that letter for me?’
‘This?’ Mrs Jin asked as though surprised to discover the letter in her hands. ‘Yes.’ She made no move to hand it over, but lowered her voice conspiratorially. ‘It was quite strange. Amazing, actually. Just now, the doorbell rang. I opened the door to find a young man dressed from head to toe in the uniform of a Qing dynasty postman.’
I considered this a moment. ‘Qing … You mean with the character for messenger, chai, enclosed in a circle on his tunic?’ With my thumbs and forefingers, I described a circle and held it against my chest to indicate a badge.
‘Exactly. Waa. You know your history.’
‘I watch a lot of historical soaps.’
‘That’s it. It was like he’d wandered off the set of one of those. You know how they’re always filming around here?’
I nodded. Our neighbourhood was one of the last standing traditional hutong areas in the city: narrow laneways lined with grey brick walls over which one caught glimpses of pomegranate and haw, austerely elegant red doorways with winged eaves from which wild grasses sprang, secret homes and gardens. Pedlars daily made their way through the alleys singing out for scrap, old microwaves and bottles, and selling potted plants, doonas and the evening paper, the name of which looped out from a squawking tape recorder on the hawker’s bicycle – Beijing wanbao! Beijing wanbao! – as reliable an indicator of the time as the clappers and gongs of the roving watchmen or the music of the Drum and Bell Towers in times of old. When the weather was fine, children chased one another through the hutong, madly propelling miniature plastic cars at people’s ankles and playing high-spirited games of shuttlecock. Every afternoon, wiry little Granny Feng, from the dazayuan across the way, pushed her husband out into the lane in his wheelchair, returned to get her chair and her knitting, and the two of them would spend the rest of the day there, courting the sunlight on their faces and collecting neighbourhood gossip, occasionally nodding off when the excitement became too much. White, black and black-and-white cats, no doubt all related to one original Qing dynasty pair, prowled the grey-tiled rooftops. Songbirds sang in their cages and sour-faced Pekinese with little satin bows holding the hair out of their beady, smug little eyes walked their middle-aged owners. Everyone knew everyone else’s business. Old Beijing. You couldn’t step out the door without tripping over a film crew.
‘So there was this boy, in his Qing dynasty uniform, and he never once stepped out of character as he passed me your letter.’ Absorbed in her story, Mrs Jin forgot how terrible the ta was for her back and sat down, releasing Mimi to run in crazed circles on the floor. ‘Even his gestures and the language he used were very old school. It was quite clever. So I thought maybe I’d like to use the service in the future for fun. I could write about it on Weibo too.’
An enthusiastic user of Weibo, China’s Twitter, Mrs Jin broadcast all the goings-on in the hutong as well as critiques of the Peking Operas she faithfully attended. She had over ten thousand followers.
‘I asked him if he could give me a card with a phone number or website,’ she continued. ‘Well, he stared at me with a look of total dismay or confusion, as if I’d asked him for, I don’t know, the phone number of the president of China or a lift on a spaceship. I smelled it then. I smelled it before I saw it.’
I waited.
Mrs Jin waited longer.
I gave up. ‘Smelled what?’
‘His horse.’
‘He had a horse?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Mrs Jin confirmed. ‘Weird, hey? He had a horse. A beautiful, big shiny chestnut with a white star on his forehead. I love the smell of horses, that close grassy smell. As you know, I spent some time during the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia getting “re-educated” by the masses. Great people. Terrible food. Wonderful horses.’
‘Sure. But how –’
‘I have no idea. The strangest thing is I didn’t even notice it until he’d handed me the letter and turned to remount.’
Horse-and donkey-pulled carts of vegetables and handmade furniture had been common sights on the streets of Beijing when I first lived here in the early 1980s, but they had long been banished from the city: the traffic was beastly enough without putting real animals in the mix. Occasionally, a peasant with vegetables piled high on the back of his horse cart sneaked in by night and, pulling over by the side of the road, sold off his crop for enough money to cover th
e fines or bribes. But the thought of someone flaunting the rules so brazenly as to ride a horse, and in the crowded, narrow alleyways around our courtyard house at that, made both of us laugh. Anything could happen in Beijing and it often did.
‘That’s not all,’ Mrs Jin said. ‘Look at this.’ She shook the envelope at me for emphasis. ‘I haven’t seen anything like it in years.’ Mrs Jin now held the envelope up to the light, flipping it over, and over once again. Only after ascertaining that there was no way at all to read the contents through the envelope did she hand it to me.
I instantly saw what had so intrigued Mrs Jin, delivery system aside. The sender had written my Chinese name and address in brush and ink the old-fashioned way, in vertical columns and using the complex old-style characters that few people in the mainland were even able to read these days, much less write. The calligraphy was fluid, if a little shaky, as though written with a palsied hand. You could still smell the ink, suggesting that it had been written and delivered within the time it might take the words to dry. I could feel Mrs Jin’s curiosity expand to fill the room, sucking up oxygen.
I placed the envelope on the kangzhuo and invited Mrs Jin to stay and have a cup of tea – insisted she do so, in fact. This was a cultural trick I picked up in Taiwan, where I’d gone in the late seventies to continue my language study after finishing my university degree in Chinese studies. Like much of my deeper knowledge of Chinese culture, I’d learned this custom the hard way. Early on in my time there, my teacher, whom I revered, had invited me to drop in after dinner. She’d greeted me warmly and placed a plate of sunflower seeds, sesame crackers and a lidded mug of tea before me, refreshing it from time to time without fuss as we chatted. When I felt the evening drawing to its natural conclusion – that point when the conversation lulls, the host discreetly stifles a yawn and it’s time to make a polite noise about ‘early starts’ – I said that I really ought to go and leave her to her rest. ‘Stay,’ my teacher said. ‘The night is young.’ She offered to refresh my cup of tea. Confused, especially as it was getting quite late, I thanked her and said that would be lovely. The conversation stumbled along with what I felt was a distinct awkwardness for another twenty minutes or so. When we reached what I was certain was another exit point, exactly the same thing happened. By the time I did feel free to leave, my bladder was full, it was past midnight and my teacher wore an expression that had begun to look as much like exasperation as exhaustion, even if she remained infallibly courteous. The Chinese friend to whom I told this story the next day was horrified. That offer of tea, at that point in the evening, was the signal to leave. If my early life in Chinese society had been a game show, I’d never have made it to the final round. ‘I’ll just go put on the kettle,’ I now said pointedly. Mrs Jin wriggled towards the edge of the ta and launched herself off like a little red cannonball, deftly scooping up Mimi from a pillow on the ta where she’d settled in for a nap following her exertions.
